Not That He Brought Flowers, Bread of Truth

The Bread of Truth: Poems by RS Thomas, 48 pages

Not That He Brought Flowers by RS Thomas, 45 pages

RS Thomas was a 20th century Welsh Anglican country curate, a modernist in form with an antiquarian's imagination, his poems perhaps something more, but certainly not less, than 

     Something for neo-Edwardians

     Of a test-tube age to grow glum about

     In their conditioned libraries.

These are not the poems of an eager young man, but of a maturity

     When love has changed to a grave service

     Of a cold queen.

They often show the tension of a man whose heart and voice were distinctly Welsh but who wrote verse exclusively in English, a cultured clerk who longed for simplicity, a pastoralist who recognized the arduous hardship of rural life, a man of faith whose ministry brought him into daily contact with the dying, the grieving, and the broken.  Perhaps it is in his bleak reconciliation of these tensions that Thomas' poetic work is most valuable, in its rejection of the

     Emptiness of the bare mind

     Without knowledge, and the frost

     Of knowledge, where there is no love

and the corresponding claim that 

     ... We must dip belief

     Not in dew nor in the cool fountain

     Of beech buds, but in seas

     Of manure through which they squelch

     To the bleakness of their assignations.